Nickleby and After
After his greatest success in 1980 with The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby for the Royal Shakespeare Company, an adaptation of Charles Dickens's novel Nicholas Nickleby, he resumed writing original plays which deal more overtly with political subjects. After the abandonment of the left by a number of public figures during the 1970s, Maydays (1983) deals with people's drift rightwards as they age.
Edgar wrote a trilogy of plays on the theme of negotiation set in Eastern Europe: The Shape of the Table (1990), written shortly after the collapse of the Soviet Union; the second part, Pentecost, set during the early 1990s, concerning the discovery of a mural in a small church; and The Prisoner's Dilemma (2001), which premiered shortly before September 11.
His other recent plays include Albert Speer (2000) and Playing with Fire (2005), both of which premiered at the Royal National Theatre, in London. Albert Speer, based on Gitta Sereny's biography of Adolf Hitler's chief architect, munitions minister, and friend Albert Speer, and other historical biographies and documents, focuses on Speer's imprisonment, release, and personal struggle to overcome his denial of the Holocaust. Playing with Fire, a play about the politics of New Labour, multiculturalism, and ethnic tensions in the north of England, has been produced both on stage and in an adaptation for radio. was concerned with a diverse set of characters preparing to become British citizens.
In 2003 Edgar was commissioned by the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, in Ashland, Oregon, and the Berkeley Repertory Theatre, in Berkeley, California, to write Continental Divide, a two-play epic about American politics, which was produced at both theatres to mixed reviews. In 2011 he produced Written on the Heart for the Royal Shakespeare Company, on the translation of the King James Bible.
He also participated in the Bush Theatre's 2011 project Sixty Six with a piece he wrote based on a chapter of the King James Bible.
Read more about this topic: David Edgar (playwright)
Famous quotes containing the words and after:
“Me, what’s that after all? An arbitrary limitation of being bounded by the people before and after and on either side. Where they leave off, I begin, and vice versa.”
—Russell Hoban (b. 1925)